To be young and famous

Warmup before the 2006 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament National Championship Game (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sports fans recognize these few weeks as March Madness, the championship tournament for NCAA men’s basketball. College basketball — actually, college sports in general — tend to depress me because the athletes who play in them are all younger than me.

In fact, there are even famous professional athletes who are my age or younger than me, including Tim Tebow and Mr. Linsanity himself, Jeremy Lin (who actually lost the Ivy League spot in the NCAA tournament to my school, Cornell, when he was playing for Harvard).

It’s kind of sad to hear how people younger than you are already so accomplished and making so much money. But the vast majority of twenty-somethings aren’t star athletes or software geniuses; we’re just people who are starting out.

With such an emphasis on teen and twenty-something celebrities in the media, it’s easy to beat yourself up for not achieving the same amount of success, and it’s also easy to forget how rare it actually is to be so accomplished at such a young age.

Paul Angone of the website All Groan Up lists notable celebrities and historical figures who struggled in their twenties only to end up making tremendous achievements later in their lives:

Your 20’s not going as planned? You’re in famous company (allgroanup.com)

Hopefully, this article will put your twenties in perspective and help you realize that you still have decades to make your impact on the world. Besides, as nice as it would be to retire before I’m thirty, I’d like to think that my greatest achievements are still ahead of me.